Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich twice called on the United States to attack North Korea and Iran Thursday because the United States has only attacked “one out of three” of so-called “Axis of Evil” members by invading Iraq. He also claimed that Muslims are trying to install Sharia law on America and said that the “War on Terror” should have been a war on “radical Islamists” instead.

Speaking at an American Enterprise Institute event yesterday, Gingrich compared not following through on President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” agenda with not fully engaging the Axis power in World War II.

“If Franklin Roosevelt had done that in ’41, either the Japanese or the Germans would have won,” Gingrich said, adding that Americans should “over-match the problem.”

Newt, who allegedly has a degree in history, doesn’t notice that FDR did not “fully engage the Axis power” in World War II until after Pearl Harbor and after Germany had declared war on the U.S. Before that, Germany had already bombed Britain and invaded Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The destroyer U.S.S. Ruben James had been sunk by a U-boat attack weeks before Pearl Harbor. But the U.S. officially was neutral until the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The United States under Franklin Roosevelt did not enter the war until the war was brought to us.

So no, Newt, history does not tell us that Roosevelt would have attacked Iran and North Korea just because it was on his to-do list.

According to Nate Silver, Newt’s biggest obstacle to the Republican nomination in 2012 is Sarah Palin. This is because the two of them appeal to the same demographic slice of the conservative base, but that slice likes Palin better than Gingrich. So maybe he thinks that to have a shot at the White House he has to out-Palin Palin. Otherwise, if that’s what he really thinks, someone should adjust his meds.

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I really want an explaination as to how Muslims will force Sharia law on the United States. The bigger fear is one day Americans will wake up to the evils of Usury.
I am so weary from the right wing hate/ disinformation machine.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep a stiff upper lip when a significant portion of my fellow Americans seem to to havee fewer marbles than advertised. People like Newt and Sarah are part of the reason I kicked the TV habit. Beneath it all they give me the creeps.

My area has a lot of fundamentalist Christians who are conseuently socially conservative. Many appear to want to return to the laws of the Old Testament, which to my mind are a bit heavy on the stoning and killing. Slavery and polygamy are okay, but if you dishonor your parents or use the Lord’s name in vain, well you would regret it for the rest of your life, which by the way, would not be very long.

I suppose one might take some small consolation in being stoned to death by “real Americans” rather than those of a foreign persuasion.

I miss the bacon also, but I’m buried under tons of baloney while the pork eludes me. I’d go whole hog, but won’t boar you with details, as they would have us squeal with delight.’Wouldn’t be Kosher.OY!

I don’t know if Newt really has Presidential ambitions, or if he’s just being Newt – spouting wild and crazy sh$te that excites his followers. I suppose he’s crazy enough to think he could make it to the Oval Office. I am glad that Queen Sarah apparently has a useful purpose, drawing away into his demographic.

For years, righties have been getting “the Muslim threat” drummed into their heads, beginning with Saddam = Hitler, during GWB’s run-up into Iraq. Someday try and bring one of them down from the ceiling who’s shouting into your face “they want to establish a caliphate across the globe!!!” and you’ll get where Newt and his frightened followers are coming from.

Somebody has to take the position that GWB didn’t go far enough – and clearly, given the neocons’ goals: eradicating evil by planting American flags everywhere to grateful multitudes – GWB failed. It may as well be Newt, given his flair for extreme, but intellectually sounding rhetoric.

More seriously the moment is coming when we Americans are going to have to attempt an adult conversation with these rabid warmongers who want to exercise their fears with Muslim boogeymen using real troops, drones, etc against real people in real countries across the planet – all of which is causing a serious strain on the country’s finances, to say nothing of its once proud but now severely compromised democratic institutions. Someone has to come forward and tell these frightened little children that we cannot afford their fantasies any more.

The whole idea of eradicating evil – which was for me, the first, screaming in-your-face, clear-as-day sign that GWB was patently nuts, or an incredible liar, or both – is a task best left to Superman and his kind, not to flesh and blood taxpayers who have to pay the bills. Others have written about how righties live in a kind of childish fantasy world of superheroes, John Wayne, and childish black and white thinking. Any quest to eradicate evil – which is by definition always outside yourself and never within – is behind this. There are few things more crazy about rightwingers than this immature notion that they are somehow pure and blameless, and all horrors lie outside.

Given this approaching day of reckoning, I can see several outcomes:

1) the militarists are pushed back by reality

2) the militarists lower their costs by replacing troops with robots of various kinds – remote controlled drones are an example. I suspect this was part of Rumsfelds’ vision. This will give a whole new meaning to the phrase “American war machine”. What a boost to unemployed engineers and software people. I suspect this alternative is being feverishly pushed by anyone with a stake in the defense budget.

3) the militarism continues as-is, and the rest of American life continues to be shredded to pay for it. Our country’s defense budget exceeds the next ten countries combined. This includes Russia and China. I’ve read others (Stirling Newberry) say that people in the red states – including Newt’s Georgia – view the military as an entitlement program. Regardless of where you live, it is a well trod viable path out of an underclass into something resembling mainstream American life (assuming you survive). Sort of like going to college was, for those born after World War 2. Sad, that making war, instead of producing an educated population and presumably a better world, is now America’s biggest contribution.

It’s not that evil doesn’t exist, but let’s be realistic, is my plea. Let’s see where all this is going, and decide if this is what we want.

Following the metaphor of food, Newt’s like a bad onion that found its way into your dinner. Ten hours (or years) later, you think you’re finally and completely done with him, but he just keeps coming back to make you miserable.

Still, I suspect his brand of “FoulThink” is just too far out there for, oh, 80 percent of the electorate these days. He doesn’t even try to disguise his insanity.

A little OT, but not much. If it comes to your town – run, do not walk – to see Oliver Stone’s new movie South of the Border. Stone visits with seven leaders of South American countries, including Hugo Chavez, to document the remarkable transformation of nearly the entire continent away from oligarchic rule to something more like real democracy. This, despite intense opposition from the privately held media in each country.

Critics who paint the film as a leftwing lovefest between Stone and Chavez miss the larger point about the entire region’s transformation.

Going back to my earlier comment, Stone interviewed Argentina’s former president Nestor Kirchner who recounted a conversation he had with GW Bush about the regions’ economic problems:

KIRCHNER: I said that a solution for the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan. And he got angry. He said the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats. He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war.
And that the United States has grown stronger with war.

No doubt about it. Newt is one of the more ridiculous figures on the political scene. He shut down Congress when he was Speaker because, while accompanying Clinton on some junket, he hadn’t been allowed to deplane by way of the ‘front door’ of Air Force I (he was directed to the ‘back door.) In other words, he was ‘getting even,’ shutting down Congress to ‘punish’ Clinton.

He’s also a sly dog. Early on in his political career it was a common practice of his to, under-cover, plant a story in a newspaper and when weeks later he was asked by a reporter where he had gotten whatever info he was referring to, he’d answer that he’d read it in the newspaper.

I hear about people wanting to establish Sharia law here; but, such statements come primarily from men who seem to have forgotten about American women who have fought too hard to get the vote and equality in the workplace. I think women are much fiercer than men when it comes to fighting for what is right. Even conservative women who have some prominence are not going give that up easily. Look at that old woman Schlafly. She couldn’t become subserviant under Sharia law any more than Maha and I could. But, then, again, really knowing the American woman means knowing something about history; and, most of the fearmongers don’t seem to know much about history or biology. How does that song go?

Hmm, all this crap about Sharia law reminds me about how one of the know-nothing members of the Oklahoma legislature not long ago introduced a bill to prohibit liberals from implementing Sharia law without realizing they would be the biggest critics of such a move. Unfortunately most of the righties are singularly ignorant of American history except to the extent it is rewritten and manufactured by the likes of David Barton. Evidently Newt is counting on righties’ historical amnesia about how he ended his first two marriages and was bopping his present wife Callista while married to second wife Marianne while calling for President Clinton’s impeachment. Newt is also counting on people to forget that he made a lot of enemies in his own party and that he tried to shut down government funding in a fit of pique with his seating on Air Force One.

Bonnie-I think you are recalling Sam Cooke’s song “Wonderful World.” Unfortunately, the dumbing down of the citizens continues apace.

Moonbat: that’s really interesting about Democracy breaking out in South America. It fits with my sneaking suspicion that one reason we do so much business with China when we could be doing more within the Western Hemisphere is that our leaders prefer brutal police states, like China, to burgeoning democracies.

All I can say is that I hope a lot of people vote in November. There’s a lot of nutcase right-wingers running that are depending on normal people staying home.

Have Newt get back to me as soon as Iran or North Korea declares Anschluss with a neighbor, or annexes the Sudetenland. Then maybe a WWII analogy will be interesting. Until then the whole “Axis” metaphor was strained when it was first created, and it hasn’t aged well.

BTW, if he’s so smart, why hasn’t he figured out a way to pit these two Evil Forces against each other. I’m pretty sure Sharia law has no place for the Juche Idea or vice versa. You’d think that a person who claims to be smart enough to be President could concoct a way to set them at each other’s throats and save us the trouble of dealing with them.

And would it be rude to point out at this point that there are millions of Muslims around the world who live in countries without Sharia law, just as there are millions of Catholics in countries around the world that do not run under Canon Law? Why, as I recall, Gingrich recently became one of them. Hmmm. How about that?